The photos of US soldiers abusing and humiliating Iraqi detainees may have provoked outrage across the world. But for Hiyam Abbas they merely confirmed what she already knew - that US guards had tortured her 22-year-old son Hassan.

Breaking down in tears, Mrs Abbas said US guards had refused to let her in. She had so far only managed to see Hassan once - two months ago - following his arrest last November.

"He told me: 'Mum, they are taking our clothes off. We are nude all the time. They are getting dogs to smell our arses. They are also beating us with cables.'

"It's completely humiliating," Mrs Abbas said. "My son is sick and suffering from hypertension. During the interview the American soldiers were standing so close to us. My son was crying."

Her son had been detained in the Baghdad suburb of Al-Dora, after a gang broke into their house. What did she think of the Americans now?

"They are rubbish," she said. "Saddam Hussein may have oppressed us but he was better than the Americans. They are garbage."

Yesterday other Iraqis gave similar accounts of what goes on inside Abu Ghraib, once a centre of torture and execution under Saddam.

The US military last week claimed that "no more than 20" US soldiers had been involved in abusing and humiliating inmates. The vast majority of US guards were not involved, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt suggested.

Yesterday, however, Abu Salem, who spent six months inside Abu Ghraib between August and February, said abuse by US guards went on all the time.

Mr Salem, 41, said he had also known about the practice of US soldiers posing for pictures with Iraqi prisoners for five months. "This didn't take place in the general camp but in individual cells," he said.

Naked

Mr Salem said he had been in the jail shortly before a visit from the International Red Cross in January. Until then, detainees in the prison wing had been kept naked.

"The night before the Red Cross arrived, the American soldiers gave them some new clothes. They told us that if we complained to the Red Cross about our treatment we would be kept in prison forever. They said they would never let us out."

Mr Salem said he had come to the jail, a short drive from the town's chaotic vegetable market, to try to find out what had happened to his three brothers. They were still inside the prison, he said, behind its outer fence and a vast razor wire- topped inner wall.

Generally, detainees were only tortured in the days immediately after their arrest, during interrogation, he added.

Many of the allegations made by Mr Salem and other former detainees yesterday correspond with the damning internal US army report into Abu Ghraib obtained by the Guardian and the New Yorker magazine.

Yesterday the mother of one detainee, Samira Hassan, said the latest allegations were horribly familiar.

Her 22-year-old son Abbas had been arrested three months ago while walking past a US military base in the Baghdad suburb of Amariya.

She finally managed to see him in prison two weeks ago. "He told me they are using electric shocks against the prisoners and taking off their clothes. He also told me something I can hardly talk about - that the Americans are raping the Iraqi men.

"This is terrible," Mrs Hassan said. "This is shame for us. We have a different culture and different religion. They should not do that.

"We are not talking about one case but of thousands of cases," she said. "The Americans said they would bring us freedom. Is this what they mean?"

Not all the detainees inside Abu Ghraib were young men, it emerged yesterday, or even very plausible resistance fighters. Several relatives wearing flowing white dish-dashes had turned up to try to visit Qahta al-Salim, a prominent 70-year-old sheikh from the Sunni town of Samarra.

Mr al-Salim had been in American custody for four months, his son, Mutashar Qahtan, said. US soldiers arrested him at his home after a neighbour claimed he supported the resistance.

A hooded and wired Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghraib prison who reportedly was told that he would be electrocuted if he fell off a box, is pictured this undated photo. The abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison includes more photographs and videos, U.S. officials said on May 7, 2004. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, at a Senate Armed Services Committee (news - web sites) hearing, said there were many more photos and videotapes that had not been published showing cruel and sadistic acts by U.S. personnel. Photo by The New Yorker/Reuters

"My father is an old man. He has a heart complaint. The first thing they did was to make him stand up for 12 hours," he complained. "They then took him to Tikrit and finally to here."

Mr Qahtan said the allegations of abuse by US soldiers were "nothing new". He said he spent 47 days last year in US custody in Tikrit. "Personally they didn't do anything wrong to me," he said. "But I saw for myself what they did to others. They forced a group of prisoners to stand naked on the roof for seven days. They also told us that all Iraqis were shit."

There are around 8,000 Iraqi prisoners in US custody, held in camps across Iraq without trial or access to a lawyer. A tiny minority of those detained are high-ranking members of the former regime.

Victims

Relatives, however, insist that the majority of "security detainees" are innocent, and claim they are often victims of random arrest following attacks on coalition forces. Either way, the images of torture and humiliation would merely serve to fuel the armed struggle against US occupation, Majid al-Salim, the brother of the imprisoned sheikh, said.

"The Americans are driving people into the arms of the Maqawama [resistance]," he said. "We now look back at Saddam's era with nostalgia," he added. "He was a good leader. There was security. We hope he comes back."

Kaprinski & Rumsfeld

Protesters chant 'Fire Rumsfeld' as US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld speaks about prisoner abuse in Iraq (news - web sites) at the Senate Armed Services hearing at Capitol Hill in Washington, DC 07 May 2004. The protesters were escorted by Capitol Hill police out of the room and the hearing continued.(AFP/file/Nicholas Roberts)

Lynndie England is pictured in her 2001 senior portrait from Frankfort High School in Short Gap, West Virginia. England, who was photographed holding a naked prisoner on a leash at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (news - web sites), was charged on May 7, 2004 with abusing prisoners, military officials at the North Carolina base where she is stationed said. Photo by Reuters (Handout)

Ali Thalab, an Iraqi man waiting to learn about his imprisoned cousin (C) looks up as he and hundreds of others stand in the sun outside the Abu Ghraib prison some 30 km west of Baghdad. Anger and resentment lingered on the streets of Baghdad over the prisoner-abuse scandal. A female soldier who appeared in widely published photograph leading a naked Iraqi prisoner by a leash was charged with maltreating a detainee, an army spokeswoman said.(AFP/Roberto Schmidt)

Prisoners stand near overflowing wash water in their compound at the Abu Ghraib Prison on the outskirts of Baghdad, Iraq (news - web sites) Friday, May 7, 2004. Controversy continues surrounding the treatment of the prisoners last year, when photos were taken showing abuse by American soldiers.(AP Photo/John Moore)

The bodies of three dead Iraqi prisoners of war lie in the bed of a truck in Baghdad, after they were killed by U.S. MPs in an uprising at Abu Ghraib prison late last year, according to a soldier from the 870th MP (Military Police) unit that supplied this photograph to Reuters. Three U.S. military police who served at Abu Ghraib said on May 6, 2004 that they had witnessed unreported cases of prisoner abuse and that the practice against Iraqis was commonplace. Photo by Reuters (Handout)

An Iraqi woman waits outside the Abu Ghraib prison for information on her relative held in the prison, outside Baghdad, Iraq (news - web sites), Friday, May 7, 2004. Hundreds of Iraqis who have relatives being held in the prison of Abu Ghraib demanded to see them after the release of pictures showing prisoners being humiliated by their U.S. captors. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)

A South Korean woman in Seoul reacts to a poster showing U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners, during an anti-U.S. rally in Seoul, May 7, 2004. About thirty protesters rallied on Friday demanding the withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq (news - web sites). REUTERS/Lee Jung-Min

Pictures published by the Daily Mirror appear to show British soldiers abusing an Iraqi prisoner in Basra. British troops were at the centre of fresh abuse allegations after a soldier came forward to military police claiming to have witnessed numerous beatings of Iraqi prisoners.(AFP/Daily Mirror)

URINATED ON: A British soldier urinates on an Iraqi prisoner in a vile display of abuse. The captive was beaten and hurled from a moving truck.